New
English Book about the Rothschilds Causes
Fluttering in the Dovecotes

"...what
business does a non-Jew like me have writing
about a subject as sensitive as Jewish history,
including the
Holocaust?"

Friday,
October 1, 1998

It's
Not about "Nazis, Jews and sex"

Niall
Ferguson says that a future book of his
has been misrepresented

THERE
is
supposedly no such thing as bad publicity.
But a headline such as "Sex and Nazi death
camp book earns fortune for Oxford don"
is, to my mind, the exception which proves
the rule. This was what I woke up to find
on the front page of one of last Sunday's
papers.

A
historian should always be ready for
public debate and controversy. It is not
easy, however, to engage in debate about a
book you have not yet written, nor even
begun seriously to research. Add to that
the fact that the subject in question is
the relationship between sexuality and
racialism and the danger is that sensation
inhibits the research itself.

The
article chose to focus on a work I have
proposed to write within the next five
years, the working title of which is Blood
Borders. Its subject is not "sex in Nazi
concentration camps"; nor, as has been
suggested, have I unearthed "previously
undisclosed material about how
concentration camp inmates were sexually
exploited by their captors".

In
fact, the hypothesis which interests me is
a complex one that will require careful
research into patterns of intermarriage,
and attitudes towards race, in Central and
Eastern Europe from around 1900 to 1950.
Of course, that is a period which saw the
most appalling racial violence in all
history -- the war unleashed by the Nazis
against Jews and other 'non-Aryans". That
will obviously be a crucial part of the
book. At this stage, however, I have no
more than a hunch about the relationship
between miscegenation and genocide, and I
am unlikely to be able to present my
conclusions for at least five
years.

Still,
it may be as well to address a broader
question now: what business does a non-Jew
like me have writing about a subject as
sensitive as Jewish history, including the
Holocaust?

I
hope that question is at least partly
answered by a book I have written which is
just about to be published,
The
World's Banker: the History of the House
of Rothschild,
an extract from which appeared in this
newspaper on Saturday.

I
have spent much of the past five years
working on the rise of the Rothschild
banking dynasty from the obscurity of the
Frankfurt ghetto to the position of
unparalleled financial power which they
occupied for much of the 19th century.
Working in the bank's archives I have been
profoundly influenced by the relationship
between the family's Jewish faith and
their remarkable success, not only in
making money, but also in maintaining
their unity as a family.

Another
theme of the book, by contrast, is the
relentless antagonism -- most of it
overtly anti-Semitic -- which they
encountered. Three things particularly
struck me. First, that they encountered
anti-Jewish prejudice not only in their
native Germany, as might be expected, but
also in Russia, France, Italy, Britain and
the United States. Second, that
"anti-Rothschildism" was not monopolised
by the political Right, but was also a
recurrent theme of socialist journalism.
And third, that many of the themes of
anti-Rothschild propaganda which date back
to the 1820s can be read today on the Web
sites of the Internet's many conspiracy
theorists.

"...At
this stage, I have no more than a hunch
about the relationship between
miscegenation and
genocide..."

Although
I am primarily an economic historian, my
work has touched on the question of
anti-Semitism before (my first book, on
the German hyperinflation of the 1920s,
had a Jewish banker as its ultimately
tragic hero) But writing the history of
the Rothschilds has open my eyes to the
sheer extent and persistence of the
phenomenon.

Why,
I am sometimes asked, do I keep coming
back to this issue when I am not Jewish? I
used to think this was a silly question,
to which the answer was that the subject
was objectively important, and that
historians do not need to be personally
involved in what they write
about.

On
reflection, there is more to be said. I
realise, looking back, that I grew up (in
Glasgow, back in the 1970s) with only the
haziest notions about Judaism and, for
that matter, anti-Semitism. Though Glasgow
had and has a thriving Jewish community,
it hardly seemed to me to be distinct: the
real divisions in Glasgow were between
Protestants and Catholics. There were Jews
at our school -- only conspicuous by their
absence on Jewish holidays -- but few
Catholics.

Nor
were we taught anything about Jewish
history. Tudors and Stuarts, the Thirty
Years' War, Victorian politics -- all
this, but no mention of Jews or
anti-Semitism. As a boy, I was keen on the
history of the world wars, but learnt
nothing about the Holocaust from war films
and games of toy soldiers.

When
I came up to Oxford, then, I was very
ignorant, and I can recall with
mortification giving offence by mocking a
society called the Colloquium of Jewish
Studies. It was only when I began to read
seriously about 20th century Europe in the
summer of my second year that I began to
see how central the issues of religion and
race were to modern history.

Why
do I do history? My official reason is to
teach others, and for that reason I have
always tried to reach the widest possible
audience -- even at the risk of bad
publicity. But in truth, the real reason
is to teach myself. The Holocaust is the
most important and most difficult subject
for any historian, Jewish or not. It is no
accident that I am not rushing into
writing about it. My plea is that the work
I have in mind should not be prejudged.
Prejudice is precisely what the hook will
be against.

Niall
Ferguson's The
World's Banker: The History of the
House of
Rothschild
will be published this month by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.